Alese Johnston was sitting on the couch one Sunday morning, reading the Wall Street Journal, when she came across an article by a 60-year-old writer who felt he’d become boring – always telling his friends the same stories. “I do that,” Johnston thought. “So a couple of weeks later, when I turned 70, I committed to doing 70 new things over the course of the year.”
Johnston set up a website, Fabulous70.com. She made a spreadsheet, and started filling it with ideas. The only rule was: “It had to be something I’d never done before.” Her first “first” was to eat a nem – a type of spring roll – at a supper club where she lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
She also attended a conference to learn her erotic blueprint – “it pushed a lot of boundaries, but was transformative” – and as a result, she says, has “had some of the best sex of my life”. Over the next 12 months, she took a pole-dancing class and a flying lesson, ate her dessert before her main, walked new trails, minted a meme coin and got a Brazilian wax.
From then on, when she got together with friends, “that was the first question they would ask me: ‘What did you do that was new this week?’ I couldn’t even go to the chiropractor’s office without having to report what I had done.”
“We ought not accept excuses from ourselves,” she says now. “I didn’t realise how much I had been doing that.”
Johnston experienced her first Kansas City Chiefs game. Photograph: Jessica Johnston-Myers
Two years before embarking on her project, Johnston got divorced. She and her husband had been married for 30 years. “But I just realised I wasn’t being me. It became important to explore who I really was at this age, and to be honest with myself,” she says.
“I think I was always trying to be responsible. For use of my time, use of my money.” Until her late 60s, she stayed in when her partner didn’t want to go out, rather than socialise alone. “You always get that question: ‘Where’s your husband?’”
Therapy helped. She kept a journal. “And one of the questions I had to answer was: what do I want? Which is not something I’d spent a lot of time with. That was life-altering, to sit down and be honest about what I wanted” – rather than what her partner, daughter or grandchild wanted. “That’ll teach you some things,” she says.
One day, she says, she woke up and realised: “I don’t need anybody else’s permission. It’s actually OK to be a little irresponsible. The world does not end because you go out on your own. So now I do.”
The fear of irresponsibility had always been there. “If you want to analyse my childhood, my dad was the fastest belt in the west,” she says. “You did not argue with him. There were beatings coming. That’s just how he ran his household. So I was always a little gun-shy.”
Johnston grew up on a farm, 45 miles from where she lives now, and was “scared of my own shadow”. Even now, she feels a “kneejerk reaction, to duck. You always think you’re in trouble for doing the wrong thing. Learning to let go of that is a huge step.”
Against her father’s wishes, she went to college in her late teens, where she studied art. Her first marriage, in her 20s, didn’t last long. To enable Johnston to support herself as a single parent, her grandmother sent her to night school. “I learned to code, back in the 1980s, before it was mainstream,” Johnston says.
She became a banking consultant, helping to write code on the big mainframes that ran the banks, moving data when banks were bought out or sold. These days, she is an entrepreneur. She is in the process of launching a new project which aims to combat loneliness and foster longevity.
Johnston is 71 now, with her 70 missions completed, but she still looks for new experiences. “It has become who I am,” she says. “I’m much more adventurous. I thrive on learning new things. I feel as if I’ve found myself. This is really the best season of my life.”
